the miserable gardener

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here on a roasting hot day to bring you some news. You may remember me from such posts as “Unbelievably Roasting Hot”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
The guy I live with said not to lie outside for very long. I might get completely roasted.

I chased the squirrel off the oriole feeder a couple of times, but the guy I live with has a new weapon in his arsenal.
A pump-action squirtgun. It has a longer reach than the other squirtgun.
Today there were lots of orioles at the feeder.

We walked around the garden for a little bit, and then came inside. The guy I live with said the late Henry Mitchell wrote that he used to make onion sandwiches, get them very cold in the refrigerator, go out to his water-lily pond munching on the sandwiches in the heat and humidity of Washington, D.C., and then go back inside.
The guy I live with didn’t have any bread.

The cowpen daisies (Verbesina encelioides) in the “way back” border are completely wilted in the heat. The soil there doesn’t hold very much water at all.
The guy I live with said it was kind of the daisies’ fault, for sowing themselves into this very dry border and not having very deep roots.  There are plants all over the garden, in heavier soil, that are doing fine.

The echinops is flowering. The guy I live with said he didn’t know which one this was; his wife planted it very long ago.
But the big deal here, at least to the guy I live with, is getting Incarvillea olgae to flower without being eaten.
The guy I live with said this is the same “olgae” as the honeysuckle pictured a while ago, named for the Russian botanist Olga Fedchenko.

In order to try to keep the grasshoppers from eating all the flowers, he made a garlic spray, with a whole head of garlic. Grasshoppers supposedly don’t like garlic. Peeling a whole head of garlic is not the guy I live with’s idea of fun, but he thought it was worth a try.
A whole head of garlic in there. Plus a little soap.
And so guess what our garden smells like?

The guy I live with said at least we won’t have to worry about vampires now. It is something that occasionally keeps me awake at night.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me in my fort, enjoying the cool breeze from the swamp cooler.

Until next time, then.

Greetings and salutations, everyone; yes, once again it is I, your popular host, Mani the purebred border collie, here today to tell you how roasting I am, among other things. You may remember me from such posts as “Ultra Roasting”, among so many, many others.

Here I am in a characteristic pose.
It’s 93 degrees Fahrenheit (33.8C) today. Way too hot for purebred border collies. Only 19 percent humidity, though.

Last week we had a torrential downpour which was pretty scary. There was a bit of hail, but so much rain, so quickly, that some of our neighbors’ yards flooded for a while.

And now I’m roasting. The guy I live with said it’s supposed to be hot all this week, but he did install another fort for me down in the basement, where it’s a lot cooler.

The heat causes trouble for newly-planted plants, so the guy I live with constantly has to remember to fill the heavy watering can and go out into the garden.
There are a couple of plants of Salvia pachyphylla on the flagstone which need extra attention.
As you can see, these are pretty big plants, but the pots they came in were pretty small, so the salvias are being treated to the “super genius” method, and that very porous mix surrounding the rootball can dry out very quickly in heat like this.
As soon as the roots have left the rootball, the plants can be planted out, though they’ll still need to be watered.

Speaking of water, last Monday, on my morning walk, there were people from the parks department out in the field. I walked up to them, and the guy I live with introduced the people to the sinkhole’s discoverer, me. They were very impressed.

It turns out that the 48-inch (122mm) pipe has a collar (I could relate to that) that separated during the big flood, and that caused the sinkhole.
Either the collar will have to be replaced, or the entire culvert will be. That means digging under the canal.
There’s going to be a bunch of work done out in the field. It might be scary. But the guy I live with, and at least one of his neighbors, says this will be very interesting to watch.

Another thing, and this can only be described as a “valuable addition to our modern lifestyle” (especially mine) is this:
It took a lot longer to install than the instructions said it would, partly because of the old, cheap windows, and partly because the guy I live with kept incorrectly measuring the boards needed to tilt the air conditioner slightly outward. He finally got it right, though.

So now my bedroom is air-conditioned, and I have the portable swamp cooler in the kitchen.
The swamp cooler makes a pleasant gurgling sound, and keeps the kitchen, the room where we are the most, very cool, so there’s really no reason to leave the house now, except to go on walks.

I’ll leave you with a picture of me, in the kitchen, with the swamp cooler running.

Until next time, then.